Book Review

Going Into Overdrive

You are reading day 6 of Going Into Overdrive. Mind Blowing so far.

I am sharing today, a review and commentary on Amusing ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH: PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN THE AGE OF SHOW BUSINESS

By NEIL POSTMAN

A Review

"Television has diminished political discourse," taken out of context gives the mental image of an old, petulant, sulky writer who is incensed that technology is leaving his generation behind. It sounds like someone who is averse to change, holding tight to what is, so that what is supposed to be never comes.

If you have that image, there is a high chance that you have taken the book out of its context. To correct such error, it is important to pick up the lens and context the writer writes from.

Dr. Neil Postman writes a brilliant foreword to his already brilliant book which he ends with the statement, 

"this book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." 

If neither Huxley nor Orwell rings a bell, then it is a long walk. Walkable, but long.

Dr. Postman is foremost concerned with the form and context of political discourse in 1980's America. This forms his lens and context. Every other build up aims to prove the point that the prevailing technology of his time has altered public discourse.

He begins by arguing that when there is a message to be communicated, the content of the message is as important as the form of the message. Take for instance, hardly would you find anyone wearing bright colored suits with a wide smile at a man's funeral as he condoles the widow. The solemnity of occasion demands that both his attire, his face, his posture meets with his words of condolence. Hardly would anyone send a greeting card to console a grieving family member. They would rather make a call, or go in person. In the same way, public discourse requires that the form is accurate to complement the purposes of engaging in such discourse. 

Take for another instance, a preacher who intends to make his congregants reflect on the glory of heaven and horrors of hell would use less jokes. He avoids jokes because it is his intent to evoke reflection not amusement. The message must come with varying tones, solemn music (if any), fiery passion as well as a sense of awe. Remember his intent is to provoke, not amuse. He might not have to change his words, but he must be careful in his delivery. Medium is as important as the message. Form is as important as content. The book calls you to focus on form more than content. He established that more often than not, form drives content.

The great contrast begins by showing the form of communication that heralded the age of reason. Before we go ahead, we must take time out to rate the students and scholars of the age of reason. We have George Washington, the first President of the United States of America. We have Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and a lot of scholars, many of which are the founding fathers. Any genuine student of public discourse and philosophy must regard these men and award them credit for giving the world metallic insights and establishing a form of Democratic stability.

The form of communication that heralded the age of reason was the printing press. Many people who lived in the time of George Washington probably didn't know what the man  looked like. But they were intimate with his ideas and essays. They knew how the man thought and what his policies were. The printing press determined that whatever you had to communicate was done in ink. If it was ink, it was going to be read, criticized and challenged. To not be ridiculed, it was of utmost importance that you be a logical, analytical, organized thinker and writer. Hence, the people in the age of the printing press knew the form--logical, analytical and organized. The printing press was the medium. The medium determined the form. The form must be detached, descriptive, expository, detailed, logical, analytical, organized and contextual. And most importantly, whatever information people were exposed to had great action-value. The form of the printing press demanded that message and communication be serious, well thought out, be careful in writing, rigorous in scrutiny and have tremendous action-value. The printing press demanded that its readers come with questions in mind, seek for accuracy and aim for judgment. The action-value to this is anyone that read well enough was intelligent enough to participate in public discourse. An average follower of print form was capable of engaging in policy debate, arguing their positions, establishing their positions in philosophy and unarguably coherent in their choices of public officers.

Then came television. The age of television was the age of no context, random communication, quick theatrics, no exposition, no question- distribution of information. In the age of television, anything goes. As long as it was a good show, then it was good enough for television. Keep in mind that the aim is to examine how all these affect public discourse. Form controls perception. Whoever controls perception controls response. Television brings everything in the form of entertainment. If it is not a good enough show, not good enough to spark a conversation, however deep, it is not good for television. Television demands that whatever you are going to display on it must amuse. It must tick some emotion. It must keep you occupied. If it does neither, you can always change the channel. The abundance of channels available in the age of show business becomes the palliative treatment for people with the attention span of a Pigeon. That is how you have a generation who have two poles of ideas apart and bridge it with how they feel. The solidified presence of narratives taking its authority from a talking box. That is how you end up with people who insult you when they cannot refute your argument. If they cannot tackle ideas with ideas, they will hurl insults at you. 

Television does not place a demand on you to be active. It says you can relax and learn. It feeds you but doesn't engage cogent curiosity. It lulls you, makes you a spectator while engaging you with an illusion of knowing. How does this play out in public discourse?

Let us revisit Dr. Postman's statement in the foreword that "this book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." 

Huxley wrote about a state where the citizens lost liberty by pleasure induced unawareness. Orwell wrote about a state where the citizens lost liberty because of naked tyranny. Orwell envisioned a world where books are burned. Huxley envisioned a world where books are not burned because people would not read it. But the intersecting point is made by this statement; "eternal vigilance is the price for liberty."

Television is turning the people, spectators of discourse into the Roman people whose lives revolved around breads and circuses. The people of print did not need to know their leaders, but they could dismantle their policies. No wonder Honest Abe Lincoln lost the election many times. What happens when the people who policies most affect are more involved in how politicians look than what they have to offer? 

Amusing ourselves to Death is not an old man ranting about a talking box. Dr. Postman recognises that entertainment is good. But he fears the problem that the entire culture doesn't become entertainment. Television makes everything entertainment. Only a small number of people would sit down to listen to two candidates over seven hours engage in a policy debate. Seven hours was child's play in the days of Abe Lincoln. If it is not a circus, we don't want it. We are very concerned about the hairdo of who tells the news because the form demands that the showman is as important as the show. We should wonder how we can have a black man as president but not a bald man as president. We have bought too much into visuals and images. We make our references and conclusions from images. The ensuing shortage of detailed revelatory ideas has simply shown that maybe an image is not worth a million words. Addiction to television makes us accept simplicity where there is no simplicity and gives us complexities where there are no complexities. How is this? Take the statement "an image is worth a Million words." If you have read this book or my review, you would know by now that the statement is too simplistic and cannot fit the context of public discourse and coherent ideas. Yet we have swallowed it anyway. We have sought for brevity where there is none.

I close with this quote from chapter two of the book: Media as epistemology which typifies why television is a problem:

But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand academic Whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against "junk" on television, I must first explain that my focus is on epistemology, not on aesthetics or literary criticism. Indeed, I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched printing's output of junk. 

And so, I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do. The trouble with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough. For, like the printing press, television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric. To talk seriously about television, one must therefore talk of epistemology. All other commentary is in itself trivial.

In summary, television is the shrine of the narrative fallacy.

Thanks for reading.